“Every builder or workman that comes here says: ‘I’ve never seen anything like it’,” Fiona Mitchell, says, standing in what was once a disused alleyway in Levenshulme, in Manchester, and is now a thriving community garden.
Mitchell, 50, who works at a university, and Jackie Austin, 75, a retired lollipop lady, transformed this alley during lockdown.
Now there are flowers, and herbs for neighbours to use in their cooking; there is a trampoline, football net and dartboard for local children; a water and food station for the alley’s resident cats; and a barbecue for the use of the community.
At night, the ginnel twinkles with the light of thousands of multicoloured solar-powered fairy lights that come on at dusk, giving the alley a magical quality.
And while other inner-city ginnels – some only a few hundred yards away – give off unpleasant summer smells, wafting out of ripped bin bags or from piles of rotting food, here the overpowering smell is the sweet scent of lilies, their blooms bright pink and yellow.
For these neighbours, it was about building a sense of community. Austin was born in a house on the street, and she now lives in one a few doors down. “I’ve been in the avenue 75 years, and when I was young we all used to sit outside and bring sandwiches out, and coffees,” she said. “We wanted to get a community started.”
When they set out, waist-high weeds were growing down the alley. Once they’d cleared them, Austin’s husband, John, who was then 84, cemented from top to bottom, between the cracks in the cobbles.
“We started putting a few plants out, and then a few more, and then a few more pots,” Austin said. Initially, because of social distancing, different areas tended by different residents were quite separate, “and then we moved closer and closer, and then that was it,” she said.
They have received a couple of grants, but otherwise have funded it themselves. Neighbours have helped by building planters out of scrap wood and old tyres, while other residents have salvaged items from skips.
“A lot of hard work has gone into it, but it’s just nice, and to us it’s worth it,” Austin added. “No one now can afford to go on big holidays, so when it’s sunny, we get the barbecue out and we all get together.”
In ginnel gardens across Manchester, tyres, tin cans and even discarded toilets have been repurposed as planters and filled with flowers and vegetables; a nod to what these alleys once looked like.
When Yasmine El-Gabry, 32, moved into her house in Moss Side in 2017, the alley behind was so full of fly-tipped rubbish that she couldn’t even get out of the back gate.
Some neighbours decided to clean it up, and, she said, “it went from initially just ‘We’re going to try to keep it tidy’ into ‘We have this gorgeous community space that everyone can benefit from.’”
Now, there are brightly coloured flowers buzzing with bees, dozens of herbs, a fig tree heavy with fruit, bushy tomato plants, a tiered planter growing food for a neighbour’s tortoise, and two fly-tipped bathtubs filled with plants.
“Before we had this done, this was a disgusting alleyway,” El-Gabry said. They would find drugs and knives that had been stashed behind their houses.
“This is obviously a huge transformation in terms of biodiversity, the bees, the butterflies that did not exist before,” she said, adding: “Moss Side isn’t exactly known for its biodiversity.”
While they started off funding it themselves, they have received grant money from the council, and have also received several items from a ginnel garden that was featured at RHS Tatton.
Her next goal, El-Gabry said, is to source a pizza oven, so that she can throw a pizza party for residents at the end of the summer, using produce they have grown.
There is also a little bar, and seating areas where residents can sit together. “As much as this is a beautiful garden space, it’s a lot more about the social and community aspect that having this can bring,” she said.
The city council now provides money for similar projects from local investment funds and its Manchester in Bloom programme, which councillor Lee-Ann Igbon, executive member for vibrant communities, said “has helped engender a strong sense of pride and cohesion and helped to reduce antisocial behaviour such as fly-tipping”.
While more and more alley gardens have sprung up in recent years, Patrick Smikle’s was one of the first. The 64-year-old postman started his, on the other side of Levenshulme, in 2009, after seeing a similar alley in nearby Longsight.
Then, he said, in the alley “there was broken glass, there was rubble, there were tyres, and then you used to have kids coming down … and we did have fly-tipping.”
“I noticed, once I started doing the alleyway, all that stopped,” he said. “And when we had builders come and do work in the houses, they’d tidy up, and keep it neat, because people started respecting what out here was looking like.”
“Once you start putting nice things out, people stop doing it,” he added.
He pays for the upkeep out of his own pocket. “I treated it as a hobby, you have to pay for your hobby that you like to do,” he said.
But sometimes neighbours – many are renters, and often short-term tenants – will donate plants or money, and he will use it to improve the area outside their back gates.
“We’ve got to know the neighbours by the alleyway because in the past, nobody ever used the alleyway,” he said.
What started with just a few pot plants is now an oasis of calm, with mature greenery and established fruit trees. Everything is grown in pots and containers – this is, after all, still council land, and he can move it all if he needs to.
“Anything I find, I’ll use that,” Smikle said – a chest of drawers that a neighbour was throwing out is now full of plants, and an old toilet has also been repurposed.
“There’s two alleyways that I know of that have started theirs because of this,” he said, and he tells people wanting to start out: “Mine’s been years of growing, don’t worry because yours will grow.”
“When you start it, you start off small,” he said, “but it will mature, and mine’s the proof in the pudding – in time, everything takes shape and grows.”
